Reviews

The Best American Travel Writing 2019 by Alexandra Fuller, Jason Wilson

multilingual_s's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging informative inspiring medium-paced

5.0

Somehow i tend to think that journalistic writing doesn't age well, but it still felt great to revisit travel writing from pre pandemic times and see that a lot of the covered topics are just as relevent as they were in 2019. 

sharon_s's review against another edition

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adventurous reflective slow-paced

3.0

yooperann's review

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3.0

There are some great stories, as always, in this book. I was delighted by the story about the Florida lionfish festival and fascinated by the floating villages of people of Vietnamese descent in Cambodia. And the romp through Trump properties all over the world was amusing. But so many are so depressing. If you read travel writing to escape, let me not recommend this particular collection. If present day events are not depressing enough, the one historical piece is about trench warfare in World War I. So I learned some stuff, and I didn't disagree with any of the political pieces, but it wasn't as much fun as I'd hoped.

marciag's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging informative reflective slow-paced

5.0

mcastello13's review

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3.0

This was a fine, if longer than strictly necessary, collection, but nothing special. My favorite piece was “I Walked From Selma to Montgomery,” which feels especially prescient right now.

Unsurprisingly, many of these pieces focus on the affects of the climate crisis on various places around the world. I suspect future iterations of this collection will increasingly incorporate these types of stories as the crisis continues to worsen.

Also, a lot of these pieces didn’t really seem like “travel” writing. Many felt more like history or political or nature writing, all of which of course often overlap with travel writing. Still, it was a bit of a frustrating reading experience from that point of view.
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